grief's room

I used to describe grief as a river, and then a tidal wave, and a number of other things. 

Now it just feels like being in an old and dark room with only a flashlight for light and a stuffed bear for company. It’s not bad really, it’s even a little familiar, but it certainly isn’t comfortable. 

It goes something like this: I’m sitting on the floor, in the middle of the room, a room that could be somewhere I once lived but perhaps not, it’s too dark to tell. My legs are crossed, in my right hand I’m holding a flashlight, like it might be a sword and keep my from harm. But really it’s just a flashlight. In my lap is a stuffed bear and it’s quite possibly my bear, the one I’ve had since the day I was born. I hold the bear with my left hand, like it might help any of it make sense. It doesn’t. 

That’s how it feels, how it looks to me. 

When it was just the thing that might happen, just the reality of mortality that would one day catch up to someone I loved, it was a wet kind of grief. It looked like water to sink in, and flout upon. It was the river likely to carry me far way from here, to somewhere I’d never been and could not decide if I’d like to find out. It was wet and adventurous in only the way loss, deep loss, seemed to be. 

Now it’s just a room, too long forgotten and left alone to even have a ghost. It’s dusty and there’s nowhere to sit, so the floor is the only option. And I have nothing but a stuffed bear and a flashlight. It’s empty. There might be a window, and it might be night time, but it doesn’t really matter. Because it’s just an empty room. And there’s nothing to do. 

Just an empty room and nowhere to go, nothing to do, just the empty floor in the empty room. It’s not so bad. Not in the way I was expecting. It’s not at all what I thought it would be. 

I thought I would lose myself, in all the ways that matter, the moment it all ended. All I did was cry. And after that, I ate some breakfast. It was so simple, and I wasn’t mad anymore. The day before I thought the world ought to stop turning, just long enough for me feel enough of it to carry on, that the world and life’s continuation was a slight against me. But I ate breakfast. And I can’t help but feel and think it odd. 

It is odd and uncomfortable and even a bit awkward, because if I have anything to say about it, anything I’ve learned from the Great Book, it’s that we weren’t really made to be separated. Wasn’t really the plan. But that sometimes the plan changes and we have to make do. Doesn’t make it any less than what it is, just helps it makes sense. 

Because it doesn’t feel fair, because it isn’t. That’s the reality, it isn’t fair and it isn’t really right, but it is what’s happening.

So all I can do is sit in my room. My room where grief seems to have taken root and wait. That’s all I can think to do, is wait. For what I don’t know yet, why I’m not sure. But it’s all I know. Waiting. Waiting it out, or waiting it through, I don’t know. So, I'll wait.